You have painted along with Bob Ross for several episodes now and might even have tried fancy stuff using black gesso or contact paper. Your girlfriend/boyfriend is threatening to kick you out if you ‘put one more stupid mountain painting on the living room wall’. Your big two-inch-brush is losing its last hair and you feel like it is time for you to move on from ‘The Joy of Painting’.

While Bob Ross is a fantastic source of information for first time painters most of us feel like painting something else after a while. Armed with Bob’s basics of mixing colors, creating the illusion of distance, and applying highlights (remember: thin paint sticks to thick paint) there is nothing keeping you from venturing further into the realms of...